Talk:Benito Mussolini
Excellent work on combining succession boxes into one, TR. ML4E 19:28, May 30, 2010 (UTC) :Thanks. Now if I can figure out how to get borders so it likes like a grid, and thus make it easy to read. TR 19:29, May 30, 2010 (UTC) ::I agree, it looks great. Turtle Fan 20:23, May 30, 2010 (UTC) Italy in CdE, and Related Topics So it seems that either Hitler has subcontracted the job of punishing Britain for switching back to Mussolini, or else that Mussolini is having delusions of grandeur and flying off the handle like he did when he attacked Greece by way of Yugoslavia. Either way, the Brits are preparing for an invasion of Egypt (and sending Walsh there, thus ending his brief and highly disappointing run as a political observer), so so much for our dream of a great Arab uprising. It may still happen as a secondary theme, I suppose. One gets the sense that Italy, which had of course been part of the First Coalition, dropped out of SecCo. Maybe they were at war with the USSR in name only, maybe they were officially neutral but heavily favoring SecCo from the sidelines. We already knew they weren't chipping into the war against the USSR, Theo didn't mention them when he was listing SecCo countries in Chapter 1, and now he's saying Germany is too busy to deal with puppies--with the implicit, unspoken caveat that Italy is not. So it looks like in Phase 3 Italy will rejoin ThirCo, which will fight the USSR, the UK, and Egypt. (And Estonia--According to one throwaway mention, they desperately want to join SecCo, but know how quickly they'll be rolled over if they do. Stalin's not even allowing them to remain neutral; they had to invite the Red Army to set up bases in Estonia to avoid being conquered and annexed. However, unlike in OTL, they are retaining nominal independence.) The big question is whether France will remain in ThirCo or follow Britain's lead and switch back. There's a lot of grumbling in the ranks--''a lot'' of grumbling, according to Demange, citing far larger sample sizes than his company. Back home they're quietly fortifying the Belgian border and even more quietly slipping supplies into the Spanish Republic. And of course there was the stand-off with the Waffen-SS. Unlike the British putsch, the lead-up to whatever France will do is being handled subtly, slowly, and suspensefully. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:26, August 4, 2012 (UTC) Mussolini in Worldwar I wish his storyline had been expanded upon, preferably at the cost of the White Horse Inn, Penny Summers, and the tobacco talk, for example.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 02:54, April 3, 2016 (UTC) :There wasn't much tobacco talk in Worldwar. Otherwise, yeah I was wondering why those three all just happened to be in the same scene together (so apparently did whoever illustrated the cover) but once in a while I don't mind bowing to the absurd. It wasn't like TWTPE, where everything important happened offstage and the dominance of the bug's eye view was relentless. Turtle Fan (talk) 19:04, April 3, 2016 (UTC) ::I wonder if someone came up with that cover first, and HT felt compelled to cram the scene into the storyline. I was so disappointed when that scene finally came up in the story and served no purpose beyond screaming "See, this is not a DC comic book! The cover actually depicts stuff that happens in the story!" Then Striking the Balance has a kickass cover which was not validated by the story at all. :::I suppose it's possible, though I'm hard-pressed to think of any other Del Rey covers that he's validated in that way. Maybe it was an in-joke of some sort? Put Yeager in the shoes of someone who might walk past the book in a bookstore without knowing anything about it and do a double take? Turtle Fan (talk) 22:25, April 3, 2016 (UTC) ::::No, the novel came first. Illustrations don't come until well after the book has been delivered to the publisher. TR (talk) 02:59, April 4, 2016 (UTC) :::::I think I knew that. Ah well. Turtle Fan (talk) 05:57, April 4, 2016 (UTC) One of the biggest disappointments of Race Invasion of Tosev 3 was the lack of scenes showing the Nazi high council reacting to the Lizard invasion and the changes it brought to the game. (Maybe HT was trying to pull a Sauron, having the main bad guy be a noshow throughout.) Having Hitler, Himmler, Goering, etc., interact with Churchill, Hull, and the others, with hostility barely held in check, would have been a great character tension scene. :There were lots of scenes like that; it's just that Hitler himself wasn't involved. (I think he had one direct appearance in the series.) One I remember particularly well had Molotov meet Ribbentrop on the Baltic in two small boats flying false flags. Molotov learns that the Germans are much closer to building atom bombs than the USSR is, and seriously considers finding a way to pass this intelligence along to the Race. Turtle Fan (talk) 22:25, April 3, 2016 (UTC) ::Hitler was in two books, ItB and StB. And Molotov met with Hitler at his retreat. While Hitler didn't show up in every diplomatic scene, the various representatives of the Big Three plainly could not stand Ribbentrop. Hull wasn't overly fond of Togo, either. TR (talk) 02:59, April 4, 2016 (UTC) :::I remember the ItB scene in the retreat. The StB one escapes me. Ribbentrop was the worst whenever the diplomats got together; I wonder if that was because he actually was that bad (can't claim to know that much about the man) or if it was a concession to modern sensibilities that, Of course the Nazis are the worst. :::But the dislikes among the diplomats did roughly fall along Axis/Allied lines. Togo had to keep making peace between Molotov and Ribbentrop because his was the only government that had been at peace with both of theirs before the Lizards came. Turtle Fan (talk) 05:57, April 4, 2016 (UTC) The other was that all of the atomic bombings in the storyline, with the exception of Chicago, suffer from Alderaan syndrome, having not been introduced in the story prior to their destruction, so when they go, we feel nothing.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 19:36, April 3, 2016 (UTC) :Oh, we may have had some residual attachments to this or that city from other sources. I doubt TR was comfortable with having Atvar consider hitting Denver not once but twice. And many years ago, there was an Aussie reader we knew of who was so outraged that the Lizards hit Sydney and Melbourne with impunity that he permanently quit reading HT, announcing this in a tear-filled rant on an old message board. :But yeah, without any real connections to any of the characters we gave a shit about, they were for the most part just a long list of names of cities we may never have heard of. ::I don't know why we need to have a personal connection to places to be horrified by their atomic bombings. If you've read about Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the various tests in the 1950s, etc., it's not so hard to imagine the sheer terror of the atomic bombing of various cities, whether or not I'd heard of them before. So, yes, I was horrified by the idea of Denver getting killed (which HT followed through on in BA, and I found pretty horrifying), but I'm also pretty horrified by the idea of D.C. getting hit, and L.A., and even Kuybashev, since I have a pretty good idea of just what that would look like. :::My mind always goes straight to those who are killed right away, boiled in the initial eight-digit temperatures and so on. It's not that I don't appreciate the effect of radiation sickness and all the rest, but I'm not immune to the phenomenon of considering a million deaths to be a statistic. :::In BA, I was thinking of the repeated exchanges of bombings as a tit-for-tat, and had a strong rooting interest on the side of NATO of course. The bad guys got their licks in, then the good guys. I was pleased to see that we were giving better than we were getting. But Ihor's few minutes of agonizing panic as he realizes that his wife may have gone into Kiev after all really hit me. And I never gave much of a shit about him up to that point, still less his wife. Sometimes a personal touch is all that's needed. Turtle Fan (talk) 05:57, April 4, 2016 (UTC) ::This notion of "Alderaan syndrome" seems less like pointed criticism about a plotting defect and more about a lack of empathy in the critic. TR (talk) 02:59, April 4, 2016 (UTC) :::Addressing this point in terms of its namesake: One of the better of the many, many ideas I've heard over the years for improving Episodes I-III is, rather than create the world of Naboo, make Padme the Queen of Alderaan. Let us spend lots of time on Alderaan. Make it beautiful and wonderful, the kind of place we wish would go on forever, even as we know it's doomed. (Granted, it's not that easy to believe they'd hide one of Padme's supposedly-dead children in the role of princess of a planet of which her mother had been queen, but Episode V had the Emperor tell Anakin Skywalker to be on the look out for the son of Anakin Skywalker, and everyone loved that one. So it can be forgiven.) :::As it is, the agony on Leia's face as she's forced to watch her world end was enough to trigger my empathy. A world full of people who'd never featured in the story? I don't think so. Are you going to tell me that, when the Starkiller Base hit the capital of the New Republic (whatever that was) in Episode VII, and we watched a bunch of extras we were seeing for the first and (obviously) last time staring up at the sky for a few seconds, that triggered your empathy? On the same level as, say, the Doctor's anguish every time he thought of lost Gallifrey, back when that was gone forever? Turtle Fan (talk) 05:57, April 4, 2016 (UTC) :I often wondered why they kept passing over top-tier cities. Not once did we ever hear Atvar consider nuking New York. Unlike Stalin in BA, doing so was well within his technical capabilities. Turtle Fan (talk) 22:25, April 3, 2016 (UTC) ::I recall Atvar was pretty nervous about rendering Earth worthless as a conquest. Blowing up too many industrial and commercial centers would potentially have that consequence, or result in a lot of heavy rebuilding for the Conquest Fleet and even the Colonization Fleet. TR (talk) 02:59, April 4, 2016 (UTC) :::Well they hadn't expected to find any industry on Earth at all, and would have rather preferred not to at that. They had brought along enough stuff to build the beginnings of an industrial society from scratch, and Reffet had enough to finish the job. They were concerned about environmental damage, but, to the specific point about New York, they knew that cities on the east coasts of continents could be hit with minimal damage. Fallout would hurt marine ecosystems some (less than it would land-based ones), but it's not like the hydrophobic Lizards expected to develop a taste for deep-sea fishing. :::Hmm, here's a thought going off of that: If the Lizards had found the twelfth-century society they'd expected and conquered the Earth without much of a fight, do you suppose that, after several generations, Lizards who'd been hatched on Tosev 3 might have become quite comfortable with the oceans? Not a terribly interesting thought, perhaps, but I'm curious. Turtle Fan (talk) 05:57, April 4, 2016 (UTC) :::Oh, without a doubt. One of the questions I asked about Homeward Bound when it came out was, “Dose Harry show us what Lizard Society on Earth has evolved into?” The answer I got was no. That's something I would've liked to have seen. Atvar returning to Earth to find a society so different from the one he left behind. One example I found was my sisters husband who came out from England to Australia and was walking around in board shorts on the beach during winter. We all thought he was mad and he had no idea what was wrong with us. We already see the Lizards adopting human customs at the end of Aftershocks, so I believe that the lizard baby boomers would come to see it as normal, while lizards visiting from Home will be unnerved by the sight. Mr Nelg (talk) 06:38, April 4, 2016 (UTC) Head of State? Musso is categorized as a Head of State. But wasn't he head of government, with Victor Emmanuel III of Italy being HoS? And this doesn't seem to have altered in any of the HT timelines involving him.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 08:26, July 19, 2016 (UTC) :You're right. This is an old article and dates to a time when we were far less precise. Turtle Fan (talk) 11:31, July 19, 2016 (UTC) ::No, he was the head of state of the Italian Social Republic, aka, the Salo Republic, aka, that puppet state the Nazis threw together in northern Italy. It didn't last long, and existed primarily through Germany's sheer force of will, but for a brief shiny moment, he was a head of state. TR (talk) 14:26, July 19, 2016 (UTC) :::Neither the Allies nor neutral countries recognized that government, though. Turtle Fan (talk) 15:35, July 19, 2016 (UTC) ::::But the Axis did. We have a few other Axis leaders we've categorized as heads of state or government, even if only their fellows in the Axis recognized them. Plus Musso did act like HoS for the tiny little pittance he ran for Germany. TR (talk) 16:55, July 19, 2016 (UTC) :::::Hmm, all right, guess you've convinced me. Was that really what we were thinking when we categorized him, though? Turtle Fan (talk) 17:18, July 19, 2016 (UTC) ::::::No, I'm sure our analysis was considerably less deeper than that. TR (talk) 17:20, July 19, 2016 (UTC) Move to Hist. Fig. The two SVs, namely Supervolcano and Southern Victory, probably should be made into Hist. Fig. as references to Mussolini's quote on making the trains run on time. I'm less certain on Southern Victory since it does illustrate Mussolini's obscurity in that timelime much the same as Hitler's ML4E (talk) 20:24, September 6, 2016 (UTC) :I agree on the Supervolcano. I think the 191 section should stay--it's a more or less contemporary reference, and his obscurity is one of those notable differences from OTL that generally justify articles. TR (talk) 20:33, September 6, 2016 (UTC) ::Southern Victory is significant, but Supervolcano is incidental and pre-POD. The Hot War reference is pretty incidental as well.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 21:07, September 6, 2016 (UTC) :::I could go either way on 191, but in general the trains-running-on-time probably deserves the same treatment most quotes get. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:50, September 8, 2016 (UTC) ::::191 does offer more than the quote, I should point out. Also, while Mussolini doesn't loom quite as large as Hitler, he and the other Axis leaders nonetheless cast a shadow over THW. TR (talk) 01:09, September 8, 2016 (UTC) :::::I don't disagree on 191. Less sure about THW, everything they say about him is pretty incidental. Turtle Fan (talk) 05:03, September 8, 2016 (UTC) ::::::191 is a pretty important statement because it says that he never became PM in that TL. By contrast, I think his only significant THW reference is an analogy when Truman and Marshall hope the red tyrants meet the same end as him.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 09:02, September 8, 2016 (UTC) The HoD section should just go to Historical references. TR (talk) 19:56, January 15, 2017 (UTC) :Not necessarily, as it does reference a national leader, which we've agreed is usually sufficient to keep as an article section. Even though they may go by different names in the Danielverse, Musso and Hitler are the only incumbent rulers referenced in the book.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 20:02, January 15, 2017 (UTC) ::This assumes he is in fact the ruler--Jack doesn't recall if he's a king or a minister. Admittedly, Jack isn't the most educated fellow. Moreover, if his name is not Mussolini (a reasonable possibility), then we can't say Mussolini is an incumbent world leader in HoD, can we? TR (talk) 20:43, January 15, 2017 (UTC) :::The references to Musso and Hitler are far too oblique for us to play ball with (no pun intended) especially since this universe is already full of alter egos who match real-world descriptions. Turtle Fan (talk) 04:35, January 16, 2017 (UTC) :::I agree with Turtle Fan. Oblique, unnamed, one line references to OTL leaders in a work that has non-historical equivalents to historicals does not justify anything more than a Lit. Comm. regardless of any such ruler rule. Likewise for "Honest Abe" and etcetera. ML4E (talk) 23:58, January 17, 2017 (UTC) ::::The current rulers are relevant. Even if HT doesn't specify what titles they had in that TL, author intent is clear that they had something nearly identical to OTL.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 08:14, January 18, 2017 (UTC) :::::Carpetbag Booker is nearly identical to Satchel Paige, but he's not Satchel Paige. Joel Alson is nearly identical to Al Jolson, but he's not Al Jolson. The Mussolini stand in may echo Mussolini, but his name is not given, and therefore, he could just as easily be Menito Bussolini, a fictional analog, and not worthy of inclusion on the Mussolini page. TR (talk) 16:00, January 18, 2017 (UTC) ::::::In this case, that sounds like a distinction without a difference. It's possible that national rulers have the same name in Danielworld, we just don't know. A compromise I think would work is to have on the Hitler and Musso pages a HoD lit comm saying "An unnamed analog of ________ rules in the Daniel universe."JonathanMarkoff (talk) 19:26, January 18, 2017 (UTC) ::::::No, it's not a distinction without a difference. It is a difference. We don't have a Satachel Paige article with a Carpetbagger Booker redirect. We do not have a John Glen page with Glen Johnson as a redirect. There will be no HoD sections for Hitler or Mussolini. The information will be found on the Historical References page. TR (talk) 19:30, January 18, 2017 (UTC) ::::::These are allusions or references to historical figures but not the figures themselves. Therefore, the "Hist. Ref." article is the appropriate place for them. ML4E (talk) 20:50, January 19, 2017 (UTC) "Hail! Hail!" Having read the first few passages of H,H in preview, that part of the story seems not to be set in AH and just refers to Musso doing stuff he did in OTL. So, new section to this article or just add to hist refs, which?JonathanMarkoff (talk) 22:09, June 7, 2018 (UTC) :Tricky. I'll need to re-read. I confess, the fact that I don't remember the references to Benito less than 24 hours after reading the story probably says that it's one for the historical references (or that I was just really tired when I read it, which I was, actually). It will keep for a while, anyway. TR (talk) 22:17, June 7, 2018 (UTC)